Recent films from across Latin America come to Champaign, Illinois for the Latin American Film Festival produced by the University of Illinois-Champaign.
PELO MALO (BAD HAIR), Venezuela
Sep 19, 6:00 pm / Sep 21, 7:15 pm / Sep 24, 6:00 pm
Junior is nine years old and has "bad hair." He wants to straighten his hair for his yearbook picture so he can look like a fashionable pop singer. This elicits a tidal wave of homophobic panic in his hard-working mother, who finds it increasingly difficult to tolerate Junior's fixation with his looks.
O LOBO ATRAS DA PORTA (WOLF AT THE DOOR), Brazil
Sep 19, 8:00 pm / Sep 22, 8:30 pm / Sep 25, 5:00 pm
Brazil's A Wolf at the Door opens with a mother arriving to pick up her young daughter at school, only to learn that the girl already left with another woman. From that point on, the film takes increasingly sinister turns as it delves into the events that led to the girl's kidnapping.
FECHA DE CADUCIDAD (EXPIRATION DATE), Mexico
Sep 21, 5:00 pm / Sep 23, 7:15 pm / Sep 25, 9:45 pm
In modern-day Guadalajara, loving mother Ramona searches for her layabout adult son. Her new neighbor Mariana seems to be the key to finding him, but she has dark secrets of her own. Then there's Genaro, an odd duck obsessed with forensics who hangs around the local coroner's office. A dark comedy of errors with a Rashomon-like structure: the tantalizing puzzle-pieces of a murder mystery are gradually revealed from three different perspectives, subverting our assumptions and preconceptions.
RAMBLERAS (PROMENADE WOMEN), Uruguay
SAT Sep 20, 5:00 pm / SUN Sep 21, 9:15 pm / TUE Sep 23, 9:40 p
With Montevideo's rambla, an avenue that goes along the coastline, as its stage, "Rambleras" centers on three women facing a personal crisis. Thirty something Patricia, an employee at Jacqueline's rotisserie, spends her nights alone in her apartment, staring wistfully at her cell phone, hoping for that one phone call that might change her life. Jacqueline, on the other hand, fears that her relationship with husband Juanca has reached a dead end. Meanwhile, eighty something Ofelia is still coming to terms with the death of her sister, her longtime companion; she dares not walk the rambla alone.
GLORIAS DEL TANGO (GLORIES OF TANGO), Argentina
SAT Sep 20, 9:15 pm / MON Sep 22, 6:00 pm / WED Sep 24, 8:15 pm
Ezequiel Kaufman is a psychiatrist who works in a typical 3rd world country public hospital. Among his patients is Fermín Turdera (85) (Héctor Alterio), a patient at the hospital for more than 10 years. Mr. Fermin expresses himself exclusively using the lyrics and titles of Tango Songs, a peculiar characteristic not understood by the doctors until Ezequiel comes on the scene. A great patient/doctor relationship develops between Ezequiel and Fermín.
WHO'S DAYANI CRISTAL?, USA
SAT Sep 20, 3:00 pm / SUN Sep 21, 3:00 pm
Who Is Dayani Cristal? tells the story of a migrant who found himself in the deadly stretch of desert known as "the corridor of death" and shows how one life becomes testimony to the tragic results of the U.S. war on immigration. As the real-life drama unfolds we see this John Doe, denied an identity at his point of death, become a living and breathing human being with an important life story.
Champaign, IL: Sept. 19 - 25. Full details here.